Them shout, "Ay! Bring him back nganpa-kang jarntu!" But that kuuku him keep going.

and in context, it's pretty easy to figure out that 'jarntu' is 'dog' and 'kuuku' is 'monsterm' so that works out to

They shout, "Hey! Bring back our dog," but the monster keeps going.

I'm not a linguist, so maybe this is more significant than I can appreciate, but to me, it sounds like heavily accented english with a couple foreign or slang words in it - not like any kind of new language. You know?

It is easy enough to see several nouns derived from English. But the -ria ending on “aus” (house) means “in” or “at,” and it comes from Warlpiri. The -m ending on the verb “si” (see) indicates that the event is either happening now or has already happened, a “present or past but not future” tense that does not exist in English or Warlpiri. This is a way of talking so different from either Walpiri or Kriol that it constitutes a new language.

I think it's likely that if you talked to one of the linguists who contributed to this article, they would give more examples. But I'm not a linguist, and I haven't studied Light Warlpiri, so I can't be sure.

I read the article. What are you talking about? The article is completely right and i agree with it -- it's a language in its infancy, and I explained why using recognizable elements of other languages is not an issue.

That would by my preference at this stage without a better knowledge of the language itself, yes. It's essentially splitting hairs. I'd emphasise that it's a forming language, they may say it's a definite, distinguishable, independent language already rather than one in early stages of formation, but it's a fairly fluid process.

Isn't that how all languages diverge? With enough variation on the mother tongue(s) the language becomes virtually unintelligible except to native speakers. Without the annotations I doubt I could follow the narrative despite being able to pick out a few words here and there.

That's why the "English only" people frustrate me so. Language is dynamic, not static. They don't speak English like the colonials, or Shakespeare, or Chaucer. Do they really expect contemporary American English to remain unchanged forever? No. Sorry. In a few centuries English they recognize may still well be the lingua franca (loanword, see) for academics and commerce but much like happened to Latin centuries before there will emerge regional variants on their own. I would very comfortably predict a US 200 to 400 years from now (if it still exists), speaking what we would recognize as similar to Spanglish today. This will happen because of several centuries of immigration and proximity. Oh, and the other side of the border isn't safe either. When you realize the amount of English loanwords most Spanish speakers often unknowingly use (beisbol, bistec, computadora, internet), and in a few centuries that amount will probably multiply several times. they very well could end up speaking a version of Spanish not to different from the Spanglish north of the border (if that border still exists). Think, the difference between Spanish and Portuguese. Something like that.

I can't agree more with you. Here in my native country there is the same thing going, linguists and some people are in awe of the local "langage". They pushed it through education. But it really is a patois, with 90% or more of the words coming from the older langage.

They take great care at obfuscating the real root of the language. When you see the new word, full of K, W, you think it may be an exotic language. But once you pronounce it loud, the meaning is clear.

You know what? This saddens me and makes me angry, because it makes people falsely proud of their new "language". But it's only a lie.

To paraphrase the old adage, a language is only a dialect with an army. There aren't really clear lines of demarcation between truly closely related languages. In the 13th century you could argue that English was a patois of Old German and Old French. If you know enough of the modern equivalents of those languages, you can see the blending that happened. Yet we don't identify English as a patois.

To paraphrase the old adage, a language is only a dialect with an army.

I have always found this adage stupid. There are many examples of countries with different languages and one single army. Or on the other hand, American English vs British English that can barely qualify as dialects of the same language because they are so close, even though their countries have had very different evolutions for the past 300 years.

Pidgins and languages that appear in one generation as a blend of two languages should be considered differently from historical dialects, IMHO.

Anywhere you draw the line is arbitrary. When did English stop being a pidgin? When did Italian stop being poorly spoken Latin? At what point did Afrikaans seperate from Dutch? Your line is valid, my line valid, everyone's line is valid. If the speakers consider it a separate language, what business do we have telling them otherwise?

OK, sure. If Italy wasn't one nation, the question of whether Calabrese and Piemontese are the same language wouldn't even exist. And if Galicia was part of Portugal I can imagine that Galician would easily be considered a dialect of Portuguese.

But when dealing with a linguistic continuum, even though it is hard/impossible to draw clear borders, there should be objective criteria to say that point A and point B are too far apart (linguistically) to belong to the same language.

there should be objective criteria to say that point A and point B are too far apart (linguistically) to belong to the same language.

When dealing with a continuum any drawing of a line is arbitrary. See the Arabic language, or the Chinese language. There are very diverse linguistically, and one might call their "dialects" different languages, but then the politics kicks in.

I recently had a similar discussion regarding the fact that "Serbian" and "Croatian" are so close to each other, that they might as well be considered the same language.

I'm gonna read that. Actually, while gazing at the white bubbles forming in my boiling rice pan, I thought of something. My key assumption here is that dialects of the same language have to be mutually intelligible. In Occitan, Provençal and Languedocien are. Gascon is borderline. I don't know much about catalan so I don't know why it is considered a distinct language, but that's probably where politics enter the game.

My line was: "two speeches may be different languages, because they have different structures, but still be mutually intelligible. On the other hand, if two speakers cannot understand each other, it means they don't speak the same language". But this asks the question of very large continuums, and actually Arabic may be the right example.

Danish/Swedish/Norwegian are more alike than Salentino and Liguro, but the latter two are considered "Italian dialects"...